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100Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.
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100The narrative at the heart of Rust and Bone is a vehicle for sentiment and over-the-top histrionics if ever there was one, but Audiard and his two stars deliver the exact opposite: a film thrillingly raw and essential, life-affirming, sublime.
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100Romantic but pitiless, fearlessly emotional as well as edgy, Rust and Bone is a powerhouse.
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100One of the year's best films precisely because it can't be boiled down to a message or synopsis. It's an exercise in style that risks trashiness in search of transcendence, and it's a sizzling celebration of the power of music, the power of images, and the electric, destructive power of the human body.
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91By the picture's knotty finale, in which Audiard navigates a late-stage twist with ease and emotion, you know you are in the hands of a master who is directing with the confidence and command that few possess.
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90Rust and Bone might as well be called "Water and Light"; it glitters and flares with the urge to renew those things - limbs, knuckles, lovemaking, and parental bonds - which are easily fractured and lost.
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90Rust and Bone is a strong, emotionally replete experience, and also a tour de force of directorial button pushing. Mr. Audiard is a canny showman, adept at manipulating the audience's feelings and expectations with quick edits and well-chosen songs.
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Nov 23, 201290Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone is an unapologetic melodrama rendered in what you might call semi-stylized neo-expressionistic realism, and it works like gangbusters.
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Nov 21, 201290What Audiard has created here is nothing less than the rare combination of high art and beautiful filmmaking with visceral power and gut-level emotional reality - it's like a symphony of fists, or a brutal assault by angels.
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Sep 12, 201290Physically it is a kick in the teeth, a depiction of poverty, sex and violence which crosses most known codes of acceptability.
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88A film that's all the more intriguing for being virtually impossible to categorize.
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83Audiard's craft is still arresting, and the film hums with beauty, vigor and blood.
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83While its main characters are tough-minded, Rust and Bone is itself pure heart.
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80A satisfying story of yearning and, eventually, satisfaction.
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80Lyrical touches and the most moving use ever of Katy Perry's "Firework" almost cancel out a cheap-shot third-act tragedy, yet it's the actors that save the film from soaping itself into Euro-miserablist irrelevance.
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80What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story.
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80Sometimes engrossing, sometimes exasperating romance. In these scenes, Cotillard shows she doesn't need the validation of Cannes or the Academy. Her strong, subtle performance is gloriously winning on its own.
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78The filmmaker has created a haunting movie, one that connects on a visceral level that defies easy explication. The unembellished performances by Cotillard and Schoenaerts exude a raw authenticity that anchor the film's grander melodrama and embed the characters in the viewer's memory.
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75By turns brutal and tender, Rust and Bone is a bullet train of heightened melodrama that refuses to derail.
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75A tough movie about tough people for a tough audience. So prepare to get roughed up a little.
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75The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.
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75Writer-director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) probes the psyches of two people in crisis. His hypnotic film means to shake you, and does. Schoenaerts reveals unexpected layers in Ali. And Cotillard delivers a tour de force of unleashed emotions. She's astonishing.
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Sep 12, 201275Both actors are tremendous - especially Schoenaerts.
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Dec 6, 201270Rust and Bone is a movie about letting go of shame and making way for the advent of pleasure. Let that be your guide to watching it as well.
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70Rust and Bone doesn't come together, but it's a triumph of non-actorish acting.
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70Absorbing if somewhat predictable in its dramatic trajectory, Jacques Audiard's follow-up to his powerhouse prison yarn "A Prophet" benefits from unvarnished, forthright performances from Marion Cotillard and Bullhead hunk Matthias Schoenaerts, as well as from the utterly convincing representation of the former's paraplegic state.
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Sep 12, 201270A tender yet heavily de-romanticized love story between a boxer with broken hands and an orca trainer with missing legs, Rust and Bone serves as an impressive if somewhat overblown exercise in contrasts.
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67Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.
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63Rust and Bone doesn't earn the ending it delivers.
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63The movie wanders off course in the final act, as if none of its three screenwriters could quite figure out how to end it.
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63This gritty examination of physical and psychological wounds offers a superb performance by Marion Cotillard, who speaks volumes with her eyes, and a less convincing one by her lead co-star.
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63Proving again that her Best Actress Academy Award for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" was no fluke, the marvellously sensual Marion Cotillard, with her wounded doe eyes and look of permanent unfulfilled longing, delivers another kidney punch as a double amputee in love with an illegal bare-knuckle fighter in the French shocker Rust and Bone.
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63It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.
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60Rust and Bone is somber and gritty if nothing else, a movie that takes itself very, very seriously, even as it struggles at times to find its focus.
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50Why are certain films less than the sum of their appealing parts?
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50The visual effects are amazing, but they don't make up for acting that is restrained to an uninsightful fault.
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50Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.
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40Though Rust and Bone aims for a blasé attitude toward disabled drama - in a far more artificial way than another French film, "The Intouchables," did earlier this year - it's underwritten characters and hoary approach plunk it into mediocrity. As wheelchair-bound Stephanie practices her whale-training motions to Katy Perry's "Firework," it's eye-rollingly obvious.
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30Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.